It wasn’t too long that the death of socialism, the triumph of capitalism and the end of history were being widely hailed.

What a difference a few years and a few fractions of a degree in world temperature change makes!

We may still be contemplating the end of history, but of a different sort. It is suddenly becoming painfully obvious that the pursuit of profit and the philosophy of growth for growth’s sake and of dog eat dog is about to kill us all off....What will save us is recognizing that the age of consumer-driven capitalism is over.

This is not an “inconvenient” truth we need to confront. It’s a terrifying truth.

In 1915, German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg wrote this:

Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration - a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat.

In common parlance, this paragraph is reduced to the phrase "socialism or barbarism." Nearly 100 years later, the stark reality of that option stares us in the face.